1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a pipeline module circuit structure and a method for operating the same and, more particularly, to a pipeline module circuit structure with reduced power consumption and a method for operating the pipeline module circuit structure. The pipeline module circuit structure is characterized in that a clock controller is installed in the logic circuit of each pipeline stages so as to set the clock frequency of a preceding stage to a idle frequency or stop when a present stage starts to operate and to set the clock frequency of a next stage to an operation frequency when the present stage is about to cease, such that the power consumption of the pipeline module circuit structure is effectively reduced.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, with the high development in electronic- and information-related industries, people have increasing needs for better performance of various electronic and information products. On the other hand, energy conservation has become an important issue because people have realized that there are limited and fewer resources on this planet earth. In view of this, the industries have made lots of efforts to develop various new products with not only good performance but also low power consumption. On the other hand, for a portable electronic product such as a notebook computer for example, the more power consumption of the product is reduced, the longer it operates after the battery mounted is charged.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a block diagram schematically illustrating a conventional computer system in accordance with the prior art. In FIG. 1, the computer system comprises an input device 11, a central processing unit (CPU) 13, a power management unit (PMU) 15, a system controller 17 and a plurality of device systems 19. In order to minimize the power consumption, the computer system is provided with various energy conservation modes. When the operating system learns that the idle level and/or the idle time has reached a pre-determined value, the operating system will have the power management unit 15 send an interrupt or a supply command to the device system controller 17 and the central processing unit 13 so as to operate in a power conservation mode.
When a user is to operate a certain device, the input device 11 (such as a mouse or a keyboard) is employed to send some commands corresponding to the system device 19 through software. If the computer has reached a deep level of energy conservation mode and cannot execute the commands, the computer system can be rebooted to proceed with the commands.
The fore-mentioned measure for power conservation can only succeed in minor achievements, because it can only interrupt or supply the power to the entire system. In this case, the entire system will be in a high power consumption state even though only part of the system is activated. In other words, meaningless waste of energy cannot be avoided if the whole system cannot be divided for power conservation.
Therefore, there is need in providing a pipeline module circuit structure with reduced power consumption and a method for operating the pipeline module circuit structure, in which the system can operate with reduced power consumption without sacrificing the efficiency.